Wealthlings

Inspiration

Financial literacy is often introduced too late and usually in ways that feel abstract, intimidating or disconnected from everyday life. We wanted to flip that narrative early.

Wealthlings was inspired by a simple question: what if kids learned how markets work the same way they learn Pokémon or video games? By mixing the principles behind Wealthsimple and common collector games, Wealthlings was born.

By turning real world brands into collectible creatures and letting kids scan the world around them, we aimed to make investing concepts tangible, visual and exciting for children aged 7–12. Rather than being bombarded with charts when first learning about markets, curiosity comes first.

What it does

Wealthlings is a cross-platform mobile game that teaches kids the basics of stocks and market behaviour through exploration and play.

Dashboard

Kids collect animated creatures that represent real-world stocks. Each creature has its own personality tied to how that stock performs. Users can monitor their creatures' feelings during storms, which represent a notable dip in the markets. Creatures can be sold to earn money back into their portfolio.

Store

The store allows users to buy potions by participating in short educational experiences to heal their creatures injured during the storm and shields to protect them during the storm.

Scanner Mode

Using the phone camera, kids scan brand logos in the real world for a price to buy a new creature. When a logo is detected, a new creature is hatched according to how the stock attached to the brand is currently performing. This encourages kids to be active while harnessing their natural curiosity.

Guide

Kids can learn about the market in a simple, age-appropriate way with tips and explanations using analogies tied to the game. Key financial tips are outlined along with explanations about what various components of the game represent in the real world.

How we built it

The following is an outline of the tech stack we used to develop our solution:

Backend

Flask REST API serving stock and vision data
yfinance for real-time and historical stock information
Gemini API to help generate kid-friendly explanations and tips
APScheduler for background jobs that periodically refresh stock data
dotenv for environment configuration
Werkzeug for WSGI utilities and request handling

Frontend

React Native with Expo for cross-platform development
TypeScript for type safety
Zustand for lightweight state management
Moti and react-native-reanimated for smooth animations
expo-camera for real-time scanning
expo-image-picker & manipulator for image handling
Tailwind CSS (via react-native-css-interop) for consistent styling
lucide-react-native for icons

Architecture

REST-based communication between frontend and backend
Real-time market data integration
Background scheduling to keep stock performance up to date
Designed to run on iOS and Web

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge was connecting the frontend to the backend, especially on Android.

Handling correct networking configurations between Expo and Flask
Dealing with IP addresses, ports, and device emulators versus physical devices
Managing CORS and ensuring requests behaved consistently across platforms
Debugging camera permissions and image uploads in a cross-platform environment These issues forced us to deeply understand how mobile networking actually works rather than relying on local assumptions. While frustrating, it became one of the most educational parts of the project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of delivering a fully functional end-to-end system within hackathon constraints. Wealthlings integrates a live Flask backend, real-time stock data, Gemini API, and a cross-platform React Native frontend into a cohesive product rather than a standalone demo.

A major technical accomplishment was connecting logo detection to real market behaviour. We successfully built a pipeline where images captured on devices are processed by the backend, matched to known brands and linked to corresponding stock data. This allowed in-game progress to reflect real-world company performance in a meaningful way.

We are also proud of the product design choices. We balanced performance, usability and educational clarity while building an interface appropriate for kids. Shipping on iOS and web reinforced our focus on accessibility and pushed us to solve real deployment and compatibility challenges.

What we learned

We learned that cross-platform mobile development introduces significant complexity, particularly around networking and environment configuration. Connecting a mobile frontend to a locally hosted backend required careful handling of IP addresses, ports, CORS and platform-specific behaviour.

We gained experience building image-processing pipelines, including camera capture, compression, upload and backend inference. These steps highlighted trade-offs between performance, accuracy and responsiveness.

From a product perspective, we learned that financial concepts can be communicated effectively through visual systems and interaction rather than text-heavy explanations. Good UX proved to be just as important as correct data when teaching technical ideas to younger users.

What's next for Wealthlings

Next, we plan to expand the creature system to represent different market sectors and introduce sandboxed investment simulations so kids can experiment safely. We also want to improve logo recognition coverage and add background analytics to better track learning progress.

Longer term, we see opportunities for parental dashboards, classroom modes and richer data-driven feedback loops that adapt the learning experience as users grow. Wealthlings is designed to scale both technically and educationally.